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How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month
An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting:
"The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default."
Yeas, and every other Zynga game is designed to reward you with cross-promotes to come play the new one. A better stat will be how many remain active players (although it will still be pretty high).
I must be especially stupid today as I got almost no information about the title topic from that quote.
Is there a new trend about forcing the reader to RTFA that I should know about?
so, it took the route which all unregulated economic (and even political) social environments take ? surprise, surprise ....
Read radical news here
Q:How did CityVille draw millions?
A: Like flies to shit?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape
Um, Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted. What's happening here is decidedly un-Darwin-like.
A game of personal user information marketing, advertisement networks, trackware and high financial stakes. Did I mention hookers and blow for high-level execs?
If 70 million slashdot users sign up in the next few hours, then I can post a new slashdot story "How Tony's Possessed game Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a DAY"...
I am helping a friend make a "facebook game" and within 1 week in alpha status with ONE post to friends we already have 10,000 players. He is studying Zenga's money making setups and asking how we can replicate them. I suggested lower prices to entice the dollars out of the wallet faster.
Honestly, if you can find some half-assed coders and a http server with mysql and php on it and have a game idea that is somewhat fun you can get a million players easily. I suck at PHP,HTML5, JS and it's working. IF he actually hired some skilled people and some skilled artists, he would be doing far better.
The number of facebook games out there that are crap are amazing and they have players..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If 70 million slashdot users sign up in the next few hours, then I can post a new slashdot story "How Tony's Possessed game Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a DAY"...
Or just lie and say they did, then maybe they will.
Not that *that* could 'ever' happen.
Well since most of us are at work and certainly some percentage of works block things like Facebook (well mine does anyway), you'll have to live with 30 mil now and 30 mil after work :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Cityville is like crack. I played it for a couple days and can see the appeal. It's a social Simcity. You can also send gifts and invites directly to your Farmville neighbors in Cityville so it quickly converted millions of FV players to CV players.
The name cityville means "city city". I wouldn't play the game on the stupid name alone.
i've spent days playing it starting on the commodore 64 where it was just a bunch of squares. farmville and others are just slightly altered versions of Sim City and Civilization. so many people play them because they are on facebook and don't need to spend $50 plus extra DLC money to play the game
Zynga spends literally tens of millions of dollars per year on advertising. If you look at their player curve, the number of players stayed at less than 200 for almost a month during pre-release, and then the day they turned on their advertising, it shot up to millions. In short, they bought players.
I have two facebook games Rogue Agent and World of Avlis and I have a bear of a time getting players for them:
1) Because I don't have tens of millions to spend on ads
2) Because I don't have the flashy flash stuff that Zynga has yet, even though the games are well done
Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
Interesting, so it's like that thing... what's it called? Oh yeah: EVERYTHING, EVER.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I was playing Farmville happily and suddenly Facebook said, "give us your mobile account number or you can't get back into your account".
Not a big problem- create new account that doesn't require mobile number- point friends at it, continue (well at least for now). But any progress made in Zynga games lost. So now I view Zynga games as something that can be lost arbitrarily without warning at any time.
So I quit. Took about a week and now that time is filled mostly with other equally dumb things. OTH, I am drawing again a little too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
From the rumblings on your review board... I don't think I would try. Aside from all the name calling it looks like it uses an economy of some sort with no real way of getting money into the economy.
as populations move off the farm and to the cities.
More music, fewer hits
After reading two pages of the really long and drawn out article; I didn't see any mention of the simple social gaming metric that the industry talks about: Cost per user acquisition: It costs every game about $1-3 per user they acquire, usually through direct advertising.
No, I will not work for your startup
I'm not sure how, but somebody in Ireland got my credit card info and tried to spend about $140 at Zynga. Fortunately, my card company contacted me and we canceled the card. What the charge was for, I have no idea; I don't really know/care how Farmville (or etc.) works, but I just hope actual money wasn't about to be wasted on virtual crops or something...
Supposedly Zynga says I have 250 CafeWorld "neighbors", but half of those are "vacant" Zynga accounts.
They had some forced activities that drew everyone into CityVille, so their total numbers - based on looking at the many hundreds of "potential neighbors" my new CityVille shows - have about HALF of those accounts not playing - e.g. level 1 or level 2. You get to level 2 within the first game session tutorial.
And they provide no easy method to "drop" inactive "neighbors" to buff up their numbers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
CityVille is requesting permission to do the following:
* Access my basic information
Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
* Send me email
CityVille may email me directly at myemailaddress@somewhere
* Post to my Wall
CityVille may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall
---
So, as you can see, installing CityVille gives Zynga your email address, which they haven't had before. That's 70 million valid email addresses.